Seconds passed, then minutes, then an hour, then six hours, with no word from the White House on whether Trump was okay, or even alive. on May 31, 2017: “Despite the constant negative press covfefe” It remains an open question, as of this writing, whether a tweet can start a war.īut in the annals of Trumpian tweeting, nothing compares to what appeared on his feed at 12:06 a.m. His tweets contain hundreds of references to “fake news” and more than 150 instances of “witch hunt.” The emoji he has used most as president is ??.
When a steady stream of exclamation points is not enough, the president opts for all caps instead, as when he tweeted at Iranian President Hassan Rouhani last summer: “NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE.” The world has grown accustomed to this aspect of the Trump presidency, and the regularity with which he self-publishes flapdoodle conspiracies, casual sexism, schoolyard insults, tin-can patriotism, and outright lies. His tweets are messy, reactive, often petty, and occasionally cruel. His timeline, which swerves predictably from seething to gloating, is not just an end run around the press but a splintered stream of consciousness unmatched in presidential history, an unfiltered look at the forces that animate a president obsessed with how he is viewed by others. Trump has tweeted 6,152 times since he was inaugurated, each message a fragment of presidential id.
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And Donald Trump watches TV while thumbing out tweets to the “haters” and “losers.” Roosevelt used the intimacy of radio and his flair for the dramatic to transmit “real news,” as he once put it, directly to the people. William Jennings Bryan stood at the edge of a train car and bellowed orations to his devoted followers as he traveled across the country. It is possible to view the history of presidential politics in McLuhanian terms, via the changing technologies that leaders have used to communicate.
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Editor’s Note: This article is one of 50 in a series about Trump's first two years as president.